Four years into suing a state university for firing me without due process, I relocated and decided, against all reason and experience, to teach a college course part time. I made some calls, and the dean of general studies at what I’ll call Area City Technical College invited me to his office, mentioned a figure, and gave me a course. I did not teach that first evening, only because the state required a background check, which took four to five days. No drug test was required.
I was assigned a textbook course in American history. Composition was not a prerequisite, and the course was steered by two multiple-choice exams provided by the textbook’s publisher. Area Tech had adopted state-approved standards for the subject, and these were guaranteed to be met by the text, which was written by a well-affiliated professor, published by a major New York house, and retailed to my students at 60 federally subsidized dollars each. It contained some decent maps, but it was scattered, bland, and thoroughly tiresome. It was designed so that any literate adult could be slotted in to teach it. By our second class of going over its chapters, the students, a healthy mix of ages, races, and cultural backgrounds, enjoyed it no more than I did.
I couldn’t understand why we didn’t go to primary documents online, like maps, slave narratives, the Bill of Rights, the 1838 Resolution of the Cherokee Nation, and so forth. That no-cost route was blocked, however, by the written state guidelines, which formed a bedrock business contract among the publisher, the federal government, and the college. The textbook was a piece of American wealth that was going to roll on and on, revision after revision, into an eternal dream orbit, and it was astonishing how boring it made the American past.
The term “general studies” said it all: The course wasn’t art, it wasn’t science, and it certainly wasn’t humanities. It was the standard, American, no-frills “higher education” experience, as it is taught at Area Community or Area Business or Area State University. The students are unsuspecting consumers in a financial endeavor in which their satisfaction plays no role: With state grants and loans, they have “bought” the course with its dull, overpriced text and interchangeable adjunct instructors before they even sit down in the classroom.
For the third class, after summarizing the text, I planned to read an old paper I’d written on the South Carolina Indian slave trade—the most extensive on the American mainland. (A student would say, with disgust, “Jeez, I didn’t know they enslaved Indians.”)
But first my contract came in the mail. Confound it, but it was 40 percent less than the incredibly low pay I thought I was getting! Just as the text price had been maximized, so the teacher’s pay was reduced, almost to that of a minimum-wage worker. I called the dean and told him the salary was just too low for me to bother teaching the course. He said he would try to get me five more dollars an hour from the vice president, then called back later saying he could not. We recalled our conversation, recognized the misunderstanding, and both of us apologized. I told him that I wasn’t going to leave him without an instructor, but that if anyone else needed the work, they could have it. Then I met my class and put on my show.
The dean e-mailed me the next morning, saying that a full-time instructor with a canceled class would take over my history class. I didn’t feel like spending the time or gas necessary to go to the campus, so I had the new instructor pick up the text and its CD’s from the mailbox at my house.
Soon afterward, a 30-page “pay packet” came. Area Tech already had a background check and a copy of my passport and driver’s license; now it wanted a release to look at my driving history and even a signed form willing the money to someone else in case I died before I could process the check. I filled out the key pieces and carried the sheets around in my car for a couple of weeks, thinking that eventually I’d get over to the campus and hand them in.
When I finally did make it over there, I had to wait nearly an hour for the human-resources administrator, who moved me into her office and said brightly, “We need your transcript.”
I’d spent too much time waiting. “I’m not providing one,” I said. “The cost of getting one is too large a percentage of what I’m owed. I’m sorry.”
She shuffled her paperwork and held out a sheet accusingly. “Do you see this contract? Is this your signature?”
I sighed. “Well, if we’re going by the letter of the contract, it says you have to pay me for all sessions since January 5.”
“Oh, no,” she said. “We’ll pay you for the evenings you taught; that’s only fair.” As for the transcript, “We need it for our accreditation, our accreditation,” she sang.
I stood up when the tie-wearing vice-president came in, and we shook hands. He told me to get the transcript.
I looked him in the eye and said, “I don’t work for you.” Then I headed for the door.
“Come on,” he whined after me, “It’s only a few bucks.”
It was a few bucks too many. I had looked too closely into the corporate maw of the American public-college soul. It was sodden-dark and empty, a preconceived commercial structure in which students and teachers alike are regarded as nonentities. I didn’t want to go near it, let alone help to centralize it. I’d been around long enough to know they needed only my Social Security number to pay me, and that all the rest was bureaucratic waste and the pileup of words into a train wreck.
Some months later, I called human resources and said I was ready to go to small-claims court when they were, and they sent a check. In the moment, however, I left the building and walked out into my life.
